Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Three white high school football players at Dietrich High School in Idaho have been charged in the October 2015 assault of their black disabled teammate. The victim's family filed a $10 million lawsuit against the school. Here's what you need to know.informative article by Avi Selk for the Washington Post | February 26, 2017

A man who pleaded guilty to assaulting a black mentally disabled high school student with a coat hanger in an Idaho locker room walked out of court Friday with his sentence: no jail time.

The victim’s parents called the deal unfair and stormed out before the hearing ended, according to the Times-News — visibly shaken after John R.K. Howard’s attorneys claimed that their son had fabricated stories of chronic abuse and harassment.

“My thoughts continue to be with the victim and his family,” Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden said in a statement about Howard’s punishment: community service and three years of probation after pleading guilty to felony injury to a child.

There seemed to be little hope of that in the desert town of Dietrich, Idaho — where about 300 residents have been torn apart by the case’s explicit accusations and national coverage.

The victim’s parents still have a $10 million lawsuit open against the school over the October 2015 attack and events leading up to it. Even the town’s mayor told the Guardian newspaper that Howard “got a slap on the wrist and that isn’t enough.”

By age 17, he played football at Dietrich High School, where his father was a science teacher.

In a lawsuit, Tim and Shelly McDaniel would later call Howard the ringleader of their son’s tormentors — who they say photographed him naked at school, hurled racial slurs at him and made him recite song lyrics that celebrate black lynchings.

“It liks [sic] to pound you to the ground, and lock the door for your opportunities, and leave you helpless, without a sound,” the teen later wrote in a poem about his high school experience, according to the Guardian.

And yet he considered his teammates his friends, he would testify. Even after, as a criminal complaint alleges, one student offered him a hug in the locker room, a second shoved a wire hanger into his rectum, and Howard kicked it in.

Shelly and Tim McDaniel, back row, right, with some of their children in Dietrich, Idaho. (Rob Kuznia photo)

Howard, 18 at the time of the attack, faced a sentence of up to life in prison when he and his co-accused were charged with sexual assault in the spring.

Because the two others were younger than 18 at the time, their cases are sealed. But by December, Howard and the state struck a deal: The sex charges were dropped. He pleaded guilty to injury to a child, with the possibility that his conviction might one day be erased after he served probation.

Prosecutors could have proved that Howard kicked the hanger into the victim, a deputy attorney general said at the time — but doing so wasn’t a sex crime.

The deal outraged the victim’s family, their attorney, R. Keith Roark, told The Washington Post at the time.

“If I thought you have committed this offense for racial purposes, you would go straight to the Idaho penitentiary,” the judge told Howard, and sentenced him to probation.

The victim’s parents and family have left the Idaho town since the 2015 attack, the Guardian reported. The victim now lives in an assisted-living facility after trying to commit suicide multiple times, according to the paper.

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